HIV is being kicked out with a pitch
Unnatural virus
If you are afraid of GMOs, think that vaccines were created to control the birth rate, and believe that HIV was created in American laboratories, then tremble – now it will be very, VERY scary.
As you know, we are all built from 20 amino acids. But scientists at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln have embedded foreign amino acids in HIV, which are naturally found only in very rare bacteria. And now they are going to introduce this unnatural virus to mice, and in the future – even to people. What for? As a vaccine.
Creating a weakened or defective microbe is one of the oldest ways to create vaccines. Previously, such microbes were created "at random", but now there are methods of genetic engineering that allow you to mutate or completely remove a gene completely purposefully. As with HIV, one of the very first attempts in the field of vaccines was the creation of a virus with a deletion of the nef gene. In macaques, this vaccine worked very well, giving 90-95% protection, but more detailed tests revealed safety problems. The vaccine virus sometimes mutated and acquired pathogenic properties, causing AIDS. Attempts to create other defective viruses also failed – either the virus was out of control, or it was too dead to trigger an effective immune response.
A group in Nebraska went the other way: they created an artificial version of HIV, in the proteins of which, under special conditions, an amino acid is embedded, which usually does not exist in human cells – it has to be added to the nutrient medium. If the amino acid is not added, then the virus cannot synthesize its proteins and stops multiplying. Theoretically, such a virus can be injected into a person and the virus in it will multiply and stimulate the immune response, but only while a person eats this unusual amino acid. When it stops, the virus subsides. In principle, the property of HIV to enter a latent form and exist in the body for a very long time, may even be useful here. Instead of repeated vaccination, it will only be enough to take a pill with this amino acid, the virus will begin to replicate and the body will receive a "boost" of vaccination.
In practice, this method still has problems, of course. Firstly, the authors have so far embedded this amino acid in only two places in the virus. The virus can mutate and start embedding some other amino acid there. For reliability, according to the authors, it is necessary to embed it in at least seven places. Secondly, and this is a more serious problem, special enzymes are needed to embed this amino acid, which usually do not exist in human cells – they need to be delivered separately. This is easy to do in cell culture, but difficult in a living person.
In general, the work is quite entertaining and with potentially large applications, although practice is still very far away. But a four-year grant of $1.9 million has already been received for the continuation of research from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Institute for the Study of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases).
Article by Nanxi Wang et al. Construction of a Live-Attenuated HIV-1 Vaccine through Genetic Code Expansion is published in the journal Angewandte Chemie.
Portal "Eternal youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru28.08.2014